Temperature dependence of band gaps and conformational disorder in PEDOT and its selenium and tellurium derivatives: Density functional calculations.

The conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), or PEDOT, is an attractive material for flexible electronics. We present combined molecular dynamics and quantum chemical calculations, based on density functional theory, of EDOT oligomers and isoelectronic selenium and tellurium derivatives (EDOS and EDOTe) to address the effect of temperature on the geometrical and electronic properties of these systems. With finite size scaling, we also extrapolate our results to the infinite polymers, i.e., PEDOT, PEDOS, and PEDOTe. Our computations indicate that the most favourable oligomer conformations at finite temperature are conformations around the flat trans-conformation and a non-flat conformation around 45° from the cis-conformation. Also, the dihedral stiffness increases with the atomic number of the heteroatom. We find excellent agreement with experimentally measured gaps for PEDOT and PEDOS. For PEDOT, the gap does not increase with temperature, whereas this is the case for its derivatives. The conformational disorder and the choice of the basis set both significantly affect the calculated gaps.